Holiday homes for large groups: how to find room for the whole crowd

Three generations on one holiday, a group of friends who finally found a shared week in the calendar, or a milestone birthday to be celebrated with everyone together. Large groups are one of the loveliest ways to travel, and one of the hardest to find a roof for. Hotels mean scattered rooms and breakfast in shifts, and most holiday homes are built for four to six people.

But the homes are out there. Denmark has a large supply of holiday homes and summer houses with room for 8, 12 and up to 20 people, especially along the coasts. The challenge is finding them, working out whether the space is real, and making the finances add up when many people share the bill. We go through it here, step by step.

Why large groups are harder to book

The first thing you discover when searching for a holiday home for a large group is that the supply shrinks dramatically. Homes for more than eight people make up a small share of the overall market, and the most attractive ones are often booked for the school holidays many months in advance. The bigger the group, the earlier you need to start, and the more flexible you need to be on week and area.

The second challenge is that listings do not always tell the whole truth about the space. “Sleeps 12” can mean 12 proper beds spread across six bedrooms, but it can also mean eight beds plus two sofa beds in the living room and a mattress on the loft. For a weekend that may be fine. For a whole week, where some people have to sleep in the living room while others want to watch television, it quickly turns into a bad mood.

And finally there is the money. A large home comes with a large total price, and on top come the fees that grow with the size of the rent. Percentages hurt more on a big booking than on a small one, and we will come back to that with concrete numbers.

The space has to be real: what to check

When the group is large, the details decide whether the week is a good one. Go through the listing with these points in mind, and ask the host about whatever is not stated.

Count bedrooms, not sleeping places. Find out how many proper beds there are, where they are, and how many are doubles. Three couples cannot do much with six single beds in two rooms. If you are travelling with teenagers, a sleeping loft counts as a bonus. If you are travelling with grandparents, it does not count at all, and a ground-floor bedroom suddenly becomes the most important line in the whole listing.

Count bathrooms, and count toilets separately. One bathroom for ten people is a bottleneck every single morning. Two is a minimum for most large groups, three is comfort. A guest toilet without a shower solves more than you would think.

Check the dining table and the dishwasher. It sounds trivial, but the shared meals are usually the whole point of the trip. Are there genuinely seats for everyone at once, both at the dining table and in the sofa group? Is there tableware for 12, or for 8? A dishwasher is not a luxury add-on when meals are being cooked for a whole crowd three times a day.

Ask about everyday logistics. How many cars is there parking for? Is there more than one fridge, or a freezer for the big shopping trip? Are you even allowed to have more than the stated number of people on the property if day guests drop by? That sort of thing is rarely in the listing, but a host you can message directly typically answers within a day.

That direct contact is exactly the big advantage of renting without a middleman. You can get answers to all the questions above before you commit, instead of crossing your fingers behind an anonymous booking form. The rest of the general points are collected in our checklist before you book a holiday home.

A worked example: what does a week for 12 people cost?

Let us take an imagined but realistic example. A group of 12, four adult couples and four children, is going away for a week in the autumn half-term break. They are considering three options.

Option 1 is a large holiday home sleeping 12 to 14 people. Say the rent is DKK 14,000 for the week plus DKK 1,200 for final cleaning and metered utilities. If the house is booked through a large international platform, the platform typically adds 14 to 16 percent of the rent as a service fee. That is roughly DKK 2,000 to 2,200 extra, purely for the intermediation. Total price around DKK 17,400, or about DKK 1,450 per person for a whole week.

Option 2 is the same house rented directly from the owner, with no fee on top. Then the bill is DKK 15,200, or just under DKK 1,270 per person. The roughly DKK 2,000 that would have gone to a middleman can become the shared groceries for two evening meals instead.

Option 3 is six hotel rooms. Even at a friendly room rate of DKK 900 per night, six rooms for seven nights add up to DKK 37,800, with no shared kitchen, no shared living room and breakfast as the only gathering point. The hotel is rarely a real alternative for large groups, and not only because of the price.

The numbers in the example are chosen as an illustration, and prices vary with season, location and the standard of the home. But the mechanics are the same every time: big bookings mean big amounts, and percentage fees grow along with them. You can read more about that in our review of hidden fees on holiday homes.

One large home, or two small ones next to each other?

If you cannot find a single home that is big enough, or the large houses are sold out in your week, two smaller homes close to each other are an underrated solution. Many holiday home areas have houses so close together that two houses in practice work as one, with an extra advantage: there are two kitchens, twice as many bathrooms, and the option of withdrawing when you need some quiet.

The solution works especially well for three generations. The grandparents get their own house and their own morning rhythm, the families with children make noise freely in the other, and you take turns hosting the shared dinners. It takes a little more coordination to book, and you need to be sure of the distance between the homes before you commit. Ask the host whether there are homes for rent in the neighbourhood, because many hosts know the area and can point you onwards.

A variant of the same idea: some hosts rent out several homes. On FlyMHD a founding host can have up to five homes on one account, so it is not unlikely that the host of the house you are looking at also has a smaller house nearby.

How to keep the group’s payments under control

Large groups rarely mess up the choice of house. They mess up the finances afterwards. Three pieces of advice that keep the friendship intact:

Let one person handle the booking and the rental agreement, so the host has a single point of contact and the responsibility is clear. Agree in advance how the price is split. Per person, per adult or per family are all reasonable models, but they produce very different amounts, so have the discussion before the deposit is paid. And collect all shared expenses in one place along the way, so settling up after the trip takes ten minutes and not three weeks.

Payment security also has to be in place, especially when the amount is large. Never pay a large rent as a private transfer to a stranger. If you rent through FlyMHD, the payment goes through Stripe directly to the host, the amount is reserved first and only charged on confirmation, and there is no commission and no guest fee added on top. You can see how it works here.

Get started in good time

The most important advice for large groups is the most boring: start early. The large homes are few, the good weeks are fewer, and a group of 12 cannot simply move the holiday by a week because the house is taken. Settle on two or three possible weeks, find the homes, and book as soon as the group agrees.

We are opening for bookings at FlyMHD soon. Sign up on the front page so you are ready when we open, and can book a holiday home for the whole crowd directly with the host, with no fees on top. Then the money that would otherwise have gone to a middleman can go to what big group holidays are really about: too much food, evenings that run too long, and enough memories to do the whole thing again next year.